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Title: Linux II: The (not)Linuxing of the Dell
Date: May 28, 2024

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  So, I spent most of my day trying to deal with my Dell Inspiron E6430. Turns
out, the GPU driver---nvidia-legacy 390---isn't available for Fedora anymore.
In fact, it's not available for Debian 12, either. Instead, I'd have to put
Debian Bullseye on the poor thing and pin the kernel and driver, or find some
sort of alternative driver that'll work with latest somehow. Bleh...

  I mostly wanted to throw Trinity onto it to see if I could live in there for
the most part. I may still be able to, but it's going to take some time and
effort that I don't exactly have access to at the moment. Mostly to install
Debian Bullseye and start updating from there.

  On the other hand, I'm still fine with using the VM that I mentioned
previously[0]. I mean, I'm writing this phlog post from kate-trinity in it, and
I'm more than comfortable sticking to a slightly underpowered VM since I don't
really need to use a "powerful" machine anyway. The MacBook is only a 2.53GHz
Core2Duo with 8GB of DDR2 memory, and 256MB of VRAM for an nVidia GeForce
9400M that doesn't really need to do much these days. Well, unless I'm
watching a video, but meh.

  And thanks to Parallels, I can basically operate this thing in Dual-OS mode
by using fullscreen with the VM, and CMD-Tabbing out when I need to do
something in Mac OS X. I could use MacOS for watching a video if it's having
problems in Debian, or what's really nice, just let MacOS handle the hardware
issues (like bluetooth and wifi), and let Debian just coast along without
having to worry about those things. I've listened to streams in Amarok without
any problems, so low-powered OSes are nice in that way.

  Plus, if things go wrong, I can pull from a backup of the VM and just keep
going. No need to reinstall on bare metal or use Clonezilla or dd. So I've got
even less to worry about on a good day.

  And huh... Konqueror works with sftp and gopher when using the proper TDEIO
parts. Even shows i-tag lines. I like! I'm legit finding this out as I type.

  So yeah. It'll all work out if I wanna keep going with Linux, even if it's
not the host OS. Eventually, I'll get around to that part of the puzzle, but
that'll come later.

This was a good experiment.

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[0]: gopher://gopher.prismdragon.net/0/phlog/2024-05-27_linux.txt